The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

Looking at the second hand’s slow sweep, Joan couldn’t figure out how many minutes had passed since Martin’s departure in pursuit of libations for an illusory celebration.

The day before, her knowledge of the clock’s history did not alter the tick-tocking of their glorious future ahead. But now she felt as Martin must have felt waiting for the hands to reach the dreaded hour. Out of time. The expanse of their expected life together seemed suddenly reduced to nothing.

If she had this baby, it meant a second baby, Joan understood that now; the only discussion would be one of timing. Martin would want to create a foundation of family, Manning children who would be their responsibility to nurture through the years, though Martin would view them as a gift. Manning children who would grow up and have their own children, and their children would have children, and on and on, until no one would be left on their own. The opposite of how Joan lived her life, the opposite of what she required for her work. She knew that other women managed both, had for centuries. But most of those women desired motherhood and they came to it, Joan imagined, with a set of beliefs about what it would be like, a faith even, in their maternal abilities, their qualifications. Their faith and belief in the worthiness of motherhood providing them with answers, with succor and calm, about navigating it all. She was not like those women; she did not want motherhood, had no underlying faith in her ability to negotiate the enormity of the obligation, had no interest in the supposed majesty of the experience. She had always felt differently, had never yearned for marriage or for a child, had never played make-believe house, had never played with the doll she received on her fifth birthday, so lifelike with its soft skin, its gurgles and giggles and cries when its middle was squeezed hard. She had no answers because those domesticated questions had never interested her, and her only belief was knowing, as her mother used to say regardless of the situation at hand, she was not cut from the right cloth. And she hadn’t wanted to be.

If Joan extinguished the thing inside, she would have to leave Martin, or he would have to leave her. The joy that lit up his features, that timbred his voice when she told him the horrendous news, belied their vow, was clear evidence that such a break would be required. Dilation and curettage, grinding away at the cells rapidly multiplying inside of her, that soon enough would form into a face, a heart, two tiny feet, would puncture their happiness if she made such a drastic choice.

She could be fine without Martin. She would holster her love for him and rely, as she always had, on the exceptional traits mined during her unloving childhood. Those traits—detachment and heightened abilities to perceive and observe—had guided her through those awful years, had turned her into the writer she was. Without Martin’s love, her current engagement with the world would fade, but living at a remove had served her work well, and she was fierce enough to adapt. Returning to her original life, the one she had planned on, would not be a problem, but when she looked down, her own palms were curved protectively around her belly. Instantly, she clasped them together.

She sighed. It was true that she was infinitely happier with Martin than she had been before, without him. But was holding on to this love worth suffering the mammoth changes that would upend her life if she nurtured this microscopic speck through all the following months, ate right, did not drink, thought good thoughts—which could not include hoping she miscarried—and brought forth into the world a baby that would be theirs forever? Was she actually considering freeing Martin from his vow? Having this thing?

What would it look like if she did, hypothetically? What did people typically worry about in such a situation? The sanity of the mother, the fitness of the father, the health of the fetus, the amount of money in the bank, the grandparents and what they would want to be called—stupid names like Marmie and Pappy—postpartum depression, C-sections versus natural births, genetic defects, ancestry, history, time.

What would she worry about? The regularity of her routine, her writing hours, her reading hours, how seldom she allowed herself to be pulled off course. Her ability to be as present in this world as she was in those she invented, among characters more real to her than most of the people she knew, than the people she used to know or observe in New York, strangers she now analyzed in the bookstores, in the library, at the market, on the streets, and in the restaurants of Rhome.

If she went through with this, hypothetically, she would have to be present for the baby, could not do what her own mother and father had done to her, what Martin’s father had done to him. There could be no coldness, no isolation, no distance, no disaffection, no paltry pretend-love. The baby would have a right to a joyous childhood, which meant she—they—would have to give it that joyous childhood. She would have to find within herself additional love and patience, admirable traits she doubted she possessed in sufficient quantity, flawed as she was, consumed with her imagined human beings, the often grievous or heartrending situations she wrote them into and out of. She would have to willingly give all of herself, or at least most of herself. And the sacrifice new parents so loudly and proudly proclaimed themselves willing to make, willing, they said, to lay down their lives for the good of their offspring … could Joan do that, sacrifice herself, if such was required? These days, for years really, in service to her work, she sacrificed others, but never herself.

Only the day before, her future had been so clear, but it was suddenly impossible to see into the distance, all because an accidental breach had left her undefended.

She swiveled in the chair and stared out the large window that faced her desk. The undulations of their vast acreage, humps of dirt that rose and fell over the four solid acres, rolled out into the distance; she could not see to the end of their property. She and Martin weren’t gardeners, and who knew if they had green thumbs, but she could imagine the dirt gone, the land vibrantly green, an emerald carpet of soft grass, a swing set, a sandbox, a jungle gym. The kid could have a playground all its own, they had that much land. But wouldn’t playing in a public park be better for it? Wasn’t engagement with others a socializing force?—what Joan had avoided as a child by never leaving her desk or walking out of the public library she had visited most days after school. Being unloved had turned her into a writer, and her writerly way of living, alone most of the time, had not harmed her at all, or not much. Until this stealthy attack by Martin’s swimmers, look at all she had accomplished so far.

Her sudden laugh was hollow and high, collapsing quickly, then trying to rise back up through her throat, tearing at her vocal cords, some inhuman wail wanting to be released, that she forced back down. How ridiculous, planning a termination and the resumption of her solitary life one minute, and in the next, designing a personal, private playground for an undesired child.

She closed her eyes and thought it was a perfect time to cry. She had not cried past the age of seven, when she found a pen and a notebook and began conjuring up her own people, people she could control and direct, living the complicated lives she chose for them, the good and the bad they were forced to endure.

When she opened her eyes, the late-afternoon sun had shifted, throwing her typewriter into a cone of warm light. The platinum band on her finger sparkled. If she were writing this as a story, if Joan were one of her own characters, would she see the movement of the sun, the gleam of the ring, as an omen or a blessing, something to be heeded or ignored? Her characters often suffered the sudden fall through a floor they had mistakenly believed was solid, a demarcation point between then and now, a point from which they could not retreat, when the before of their lives changed in an instant. She had written their devastations, then watched their brave resolutions to see it through, to welcome the after, regardless of what actions they ultimately took. She had never imagined it happening to her, or that it would feel this way, as if there were no ground at all to stand on, nothing within sight, the sky so far away.

This could be one of her own stories—a woman facing what was, for her, the unthinkable, and her love over the moon because of the news. What would she have the character do? After the anguish of discovering, too soon, her good husband’s fallibility, would that woman pull herself out of the abyss, open her heart more, not abandon love, or eliminate the fledgling life within; would she welcome the quickening, become a wondrous pregnant woman, a loving mother, bask in the adoration of that flawed husband, their home a place where the good outweighed the bad, where eventual childhood hurts were magic-wanded away? That character might, Joan thought—and in the process discover her untapped abilities to live a full life, in real life, outside the pages of the stories she wrote, the novel-in-progress she was working on. That character would never abandon her own work, her reason for living, would remain a serious writer no matter what life threw at her, would finish her first novel, and the novel after that one, and the one after that, and all the novels that would follow, as she wrote and loved her unexpected child, and the second one too, through the run of delightful years. Of course, the woman’s story would need some tragedy, some arc of calamity and catastrophe and misfortune and heartbreak, but this was not the time to ponder that. She knew she could write such a story, but could she write herself into it, become that eponymous Joan?

She heard Martin’s car rumble into the driveway, the engine’s long whistle of relief when it found itself at rest, and Joan thought, I guess I’m going to try.

“Joan Ashby Manning, where are you?” Martin called out, and immediately she wondered why she agreed to take his last name, even if its use was limited to their personal life, the name on their joint checking and savings accounts.

She heard him rattling paper bags in the kitchen; noise traveled fast in a house so small and contained, three bedrooms and two baths. Just right, really, for an incipient family. They had not yet figured out what to do with that third room, which echoed in its emptiness.

From her desk, she heard the pop of a cork, the whoosh of liquid poured into a glass, then the crinkle of foil pulled free from the bottle of sparkling apple cider, what all newly pregnant women seemed to drink, the faux elixir of celebration.

Joan looked at the hard-written pages of The Sympathetic Executioners and wondered whether it would be possible to finish the book in time.

“I’m still in here, Martin, but I’m coming,” she called out.

She joined him in the kitchen. The sparkling apple cider in the fluted glass he handed her looked like a test tube of urine, but it was frothy, its bubbles fizzy, with a surprising, delicate sweetness she held for long seconds on her tongue. They walked out the back door and stood together on their land. When he reached for her hand, she allowed it, felt the way his swallowed hers whole.

“Thank you,” Martin said. “I know what this means.”

She was still down in the abyss, unable to see the treacherous path she would need to climb, to find traction again beneath her feet, and so Joan said nothing, remained silent, practiced what she thought Joan would do—stay quiet, keep her own counsel, figure things out.

Every so often, Martin thanked her again, and again, and again, always in a whisper of words, until the light bled out of the sky, the blue turning a sad, desolate gray. At the back door, before Joan followed Martin inside, she looked up once more, tried thinking of the sky as something more, as the heavens, the place where wishes were sent, where they were granted, but it looked only like an old rag wrung completely dry.

2

Even to herself, Joan Ashby could not deny the truth: she was a pregnant goddess. Hormonal forces had turned her naturally good health into something patent and extraordinary. Her skin glistened, the whites of her eyes radiated, and her long hair, always a waterfall of black curls, was growing at a breathtaking rate, had already reached the small of her back, a perpetual tickle against her naked skin when she slept. Her eyelashes had become palm fronds over her bright-blue eyes, which had also altered, the color exotically deepening, eyes that startled her when she looked up while brushing her teeth. She had always been objective about her beauty, but even she was surprised when she glimpsed herself in a mirror; she was a goddess, and in the bath, a new nightly routine, she felt like a mermaid.

She often silently thanked the baby for being more thoughtful than she had expected it to be. She had feared it would punish her, for not wanting it, but she suffered no morning sickness or exhaustion, and as it grew, it kept itself nicely contained, swelling her gracefully, not wrenching Joan’s natural physical delicacy into something cumbersome and ungainly.

The friendly people of Rhome frequently stopped her on the street, telling her she was a gorgeous mother-to-be, sometimes asking, sometimes not, before reaching out and rubbing her belly, every one of them saying, “For good luck,” though whether she was to bring them good luck, or they her, she didn’t know. At night, after her bath, when Martin wanted to do the same thing, she often said, “Please don’t. I’ve been rubbed so many times today, I feel like a Buddha.”

She was not the only pregnant woman in tiny Rhome. There were six others, but she was the town’s first star. The celebrated writer from New York, with the dashing husband who was a neuro-ocular surgeon, who’d purchased a house out in the new development that was not formally named but some had taken to calling Peachtree, which made no sense to Joan. There were no peach trees in their neighborhood, no trees at all, not yet, no grass or gardens, just neighbors set far apart who waved to one another as they backed out of freshly graded driveways.

Small-town life had its benefits; she was not pursued like a fox by hounds, as she had been back in New York, her banal errands there somehow worthy of recording, a constant irritation because everyone shopped at the market, read the paper at the Laundromat, bought fresh fruit from the greengrocer. In Rhome, however, she wasn’t completely anonymous. The Tell-Tale and the Inveterate Reader, the town’s two bookstores, one on either end of the pretty main street, imaginatively named Strada di Felicità, had been artistically displaying her books in their windows for months, and the books had been flying off the shelves, so people recognized her from her photographs on the back flaps, from newspaper articles about her in the New York Times and Washington Post that featured a picture, but they approached her diffidently, politely, with charitable words, asking that she inscribe the title pages of her books, wanting to know, after rubbing her belly, when the baby was due, if she had any favorite names in mind, if she and the doctor were having an easy time settling in. Joan smiled graciously at the gentle intrusions, introduced herself properly, learned names and professions, engaged in a different version of life’s chitchat than perhaps the locals were used to; she tended to dig quickly past the superficial, asking pointed, gritty questions. But she could see they liked her, and she felt welcomed, even if it was the baby that served as the icebreaker, the pregnancy making her seem less formidable, easier to approach.

Only once did a man tail her, when she was five months pregnant and taking a break late in the day from the novel, the new paragraphs still in her mind:

The magazine was glossy and expensively produced, printed in Englewood, New Jersey, and each month, there were twenty pages of classifieds under a single heading: Kind Killers Wanted. Each ad a heartfelt request seeking the services of executioners. The one that caught Silas and Abe’s attention read:

WANTED—CARING FATHER KILLER: My father once was a delightful man, a high school principal, who was fair and firm. He would be appalled if he knew how he groaned every hour of every day, if he knew the thick auburn hair that was his secret pride had thinned down to strands, exposing a skull tender as an egg. I can tell that he knows he has veered far from his course, that he has lost the thread of his life. He used to sling words with aplomb, but his eyes now reflect an awareness that he is regressing to an infantile state. He should not suffer this way. Please respond if interested. Will pay going rate.

The man tailing Joan froze in his spot on the sidewalk when Joan wandered into a store, then followed in her wake when she resumed her stroll. She turned to look back at him and white stars exploded in the air, the flash of the man’s camera, a photographer stalking her, and Odile, who owned the Tell-Tale, flew out the front door of her shop and gave him hell. When the man yielded instantly, throwing his hands protectively around his camera and running fast down the street, Joan knew he wasn’t a regular among the mob that used to trail her in New York—none of them would have given up so easily. But Odile didn’t stop yelling until he disappeared around the corner.

There were requests that she give readings at the bookstores, at the library, that she jump into the town-run book group held monthly at the Rhome Community Center and lead all of Rhome’s serious readers. She made a list of recommended books for the group’s leader, an elderly chatterbox named Renee, who said, “I’d be happy to step aside, absolutely happy, happy to do that, thrilled to be one of your followers. I’ll make sure we have fresh-baked cookies and real lemonade at the center for book group. What’s your favorite? Oatmeal? Chocolate chip? Butter? Just tell me, and I’ll make sure all is in order. We’ll get you a comfortable chair too, not one of the metal ones the rest of us use.”

But Joan declined everything that would have swallowed her time, kept her from working on The Sympathetic Executioners, the status of which her agent, Volkmann, was checking on regularly: “You’ve disappeared from the civilized world, so we have to make sure your voice rings out from that hinterland you’ve gone to, and is especially loud and clear. So write fast, Joan, write very, very fast.”

Martin, too, frequently asked how the book was coming along, usually when she was in her nightly bath, when she needed absolute quiet to let her brain think on its own, to let the baby roll around without being slapped down. Each time, when he said, “Can I read something?” his smile and eagerness left their imprints behind, papering over her peace. Other Small Spaces was already hugely out in the world and she had been finishing the last of the connected stories that became Fictional Family Life when their courtship began. During their weekend visits with each other, she had seriously assessed the impact of burgeoning love on her work, whether love altered the time she spent at her desk in her East Village apartment, or at the Friedheim Music Library at Johns Hopkins when she was with Martin in Baltimore. But her output had not slacked off. She had written most of The Sympathetic Executioners with him in her life, experiencing his magnanimous nature, his respect for her creative intensity, when she returned to him spacy and otherworldly at night. Not once had he ever presumed to ask to read her pages, and if he had, she would have debated whether the relationship could survive. Now, when she was pregnant with his child, he was turning into a man claiming such a right. She knew he did not mean it that way, but more than once, after such a request, she had the desire to take her belly and what it contained, and walk out the door. “Maybe soon,” she would say, not meaning it at all.

Several times a week, Joan was at the community center, in her maternity bathing suit, swimming slow laps. The other pregnant Rhome women swam too, breast-stroking up and down the lanes, keeping their heads dry, talking about their sex lives now that they were ballooning, about their food cravings. The only thing Joan craved was the buoyancy of water. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at noon, she pinned up her abundantly long hair, pulled down the swim cap, and swam the crawl with her head underwater.

Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa were the “Pregnant Six,” as they had taken to calling themselves, childhood friends who had gone away separately to university or college, then traveled, before returning home for good. In the locker room afterward, when they talked, Joan was surprised that seeing the world had not altered their desires, their plans, did not convince them to settle down somewhere more interesting—any large city really—to participate in the bigger life she so recently left.

The women huddled around her, wanting to know whether New York was as dangerous as they heard on the news. When they told her of the countries they visited after receiving their degrees, they called that time “our youth,” and it was the usual trio: France, England, Italy.

Where had Joan been, they wanted to know. She did not mention all the countries she visited while touring for Fictional Family Life, and said instead, “So no one’s been to India? That’s the country I want to see. Ever since I was a kid.” She and Martin had not taken a honeymoon, would not do so now that she was pregnant, but it was to India that Joan wanted them to go. It didn’t matter much that Martin waffled about it, said he had no interest, did not want to be immersed in the dirt and the poverty, who knew when they would take a trip anywhere with life already altered.

The Pregnant Six felt as Martin did about India, and Joan did not explain her fascination with the country. She wasn’t sure if they were readers or not—none of them spoke to her in the star terms the other Rhome locals did, did not mention that they knew she was a writer—and so she did not say India beckoned loudly because of the books she had read in her childhood, by E. M. Forster, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and others, all describing ways of being, of seeing, landscapes alien and wild, completely different from what she had seen from the windows of her parents’ house—other similar houses with backyards and front yards, identical trees and flowers planted in the same neat arrangements. Even in spring and fall, when the flowers were blooming, the world around her had been soaked in sepia, but in the Indian stories she read, flora and fauna teemed and seethed, and hard lives were fully, vibrantly lived out in the streets; everyone had a story to tell, their own or somebody else’s. Those small and poor Indian towns in the books had been immensely more interesting to Joan than where she was growing up. The books had been a touchstone, as both reader and writer.

The questions Joan asked of the Pregnant Six in their post-swim conversations, when everyone’s skin reeked with heavy-duty chlorine, allowed her to glimpse beneath their placid surfaces, their constant giggles, the way they brushed stray hairs off one another’s faces, complimented a pedicure color. They were not unsubstantial women. Carla owned Craftables on Laurel Place, just off Strada di Felicità. Joan had wandered in and immediately out, the place a warren of cubbyholes filled with colorful skeins of knitting yarn and embroidery thread. Needlepoint samplers hung from fishing lines. There were trays of beads and amulets, and silk cords on which those beads and amulets were to be strung, in every shade of the rainbow, each color bunched together, thick as horses’ tails, hanging on hooks. Carla also ran a knitting group at the store, and an embroidery group, and three times a year she brought in artists who created original drawings on needlepoint canvases for her customers. “It’s commissioned self-art, really, if that’s a real thing. Because the customer only has a picture on mesh until she needlepoints it herself.” Joan had seen the prices on those original samples; Carla charged upward of five hundred dollars. An excellent business apparently for Rhome, shilling out the goods for pursuits unfathomable to Joan, but she had dashed down a few notes later, about a town buried beneath an avalanche of yarn, the people unaware of the disaster because they never walked out their front doors, too busy knitting and needling their lives away.